Victor Hugo is now the impartiality of history.
Since the coup of 1852 the legend has captured Hugo. During the Empire, in the interest of the anti-Bonapartist and Republican, no one dared oppose the crystallization of fantasy in search of semi-gods after May 16, there was no need to disturb the last years of an elderly man, whose role was over. But now that the poet, celebrated by the press, recognized and proclaimed the “great man of the century” asleep at the Pantheon, “the colossal tomb of geniuses, the critics regains his rights. It can compromise without fear of political interests and hurt unnecessarily become a harmless old man studying the life of this man, sounding name. It has the duty to reach the truth hidden beneath the lies and exaggerations.
The hugolâtres was scandalized that a critical impious dare lay hands on their idol, but they make up their minds. - Historical criticism does not seek to please and not afraid to offend. The study, written notes collected in 1869, did not pretend to be exhaustive, but simply to highlight the true character of Victor Hugo, so strangely misunderstood.
P. L.
Sainte Pelagie, June 23, 1885.
The study, written for years after the death of Victor Hugo, has lost none of its originality, the side of his public life that I intend never been neither studied nor criticized.
P. L.
Paris, March 30, 1891.
1
On June 1885 Paris was celebrating the most beautiful funeral of the century: Victor Hugo is buried there poeta Sovrano. For ten days the entire press prepared the public opinion of France and Europe. Paris, for a moment touched by walking the red flag and police charges of Pere Lachaise, which revive the memories of the Bloody Week, began to deal only with one who was “the most illustrious representative of human consciousness “. The newspapers did not have enough of their three pages - the fourth being taken by the ads, to exalt “the genius who lived in the human idea.” The language, however, Victor Hugo had enriched so many laudatory expressions, seemed poor journalists, since she was called to express their admiration for “the most gigantic thinker of the universe”, we resorted to the image. A sheet of the evening, short of words, represented on its first page, the sun dipping into the ocean. Hugo’s death was the death of a star. “Art was finished!”.
The population, brewed by the journalistic enthusiasm, threw three hundred thousand men, women and children, behind the chariot of the poor who bore the poet in the Pantheon, and one million squares, streets and sidewalks where he went.
A canopy black mourning veil the Arc de Triomphe of imperial glory, the light of gas lamps and floor lamps filtered, mournful, through the crepe; immortal crowns and stuffed animals, portraits of Hugo on her bed death, bronze medals, engraved with: National mourning ... in short, all the symbols of the desperate pain had been requisitioned, and yet the immense multitude had no regrets for the death or memories for the writer: Hugo was reckless. She seemed unaware that it was conducting under his eyes, the Hall of Fame “the greatest poet that ever existed”.
The surging crowd and good humor noisily showed its appreciation of time and entertainment, she inquired the names of celebrities and delegations from cities and countries who marched for her pleasure and she admired the monumental crowns of flowers on tanks and she applauded the minions of the shooting, tearing the ears of their discordant tunes, she greeted with laughter and ironic Deroulede serious green coat, and to crown his happiness, he lacked only the reputation of comic Benni -always the procession - the rabbit jumped and their weapon - the gigantic syringe box.
Actors and spectators were jubilant. It is true that people in big boulevards, disappointed that we did not walk the corpse in front of their doors, speculated with bitterness the tidy sum they would not have failed to pocket, the wounded heart, they told that windows and balconies were hired hundreds and thousands of francs in three clock hours earned it two more times the rent for six months. But the sorrow of cranky disappeared in the general rejoicing. Breweries women to Boulevard Saint-Michel overflowed the sidewalk scaffolding, they bought their weight in gold right to bake in the sun, drink to beer adulterated. Small people, located in the right places, at break of day, which with a chair, a table, bench, ladder, gave way to curious for the price of two days of fun and life of the annuitant. Hoteliers, publicans, the livers of race greedy smile of joy by feeling their pockets franc pieces that brought the festival: one of them said, looking very satisfied “should be that he dies every week a Victor Hugo to go trade! “ Commerce walk indeed! Trade flowers and funeral emblems, trade journals, prints, lyres zinc bronze, gold, silver medals in galvano, effigies mounted pin; trade crepe and black armbands, sashes, ribbons and multicolored lights, trade beer, wine, charcuterie; hungry people ate and drank standing in the street in front of counters, and anything at any price, trade of love - the provincial and foreigners from all corners of the Year, honored the dead by feasting with the horizontal.
The funeral of the first June were worthy of death that Pantheon and worthy of the class that was escorting the corpse.
The revolutionary socialist organizations of France and abroad, who are the conscious part of the proletariat had not been represented at the funeral of Victor Hugo. The anarchists were an exception and to distinguish themselves once more socialist revolutionaries, they tried to blend their black flag with colorful flags of the procession; Reclus, their remarkable man, asked his friend Nadar to write his name on the register of deaths. However, striking the government banned the deployment of the red flag, Mr. Vacquerie stating that in exile, Hugo had always marched behind the red flag whenever they wore into the ground one of the victims of the coup and the radical press claiming the right to the street to the flag of the Commune and recalling that in 1871 the exile of the Empire had opened his house in Brussels from Paris to the vanquished, all seemed to want to invite revolutionaries to gather around the coffin of Victor Hugo, as a rallying point for Republican parties. But revolutionary socialists refused to take part in the carnival ride the first of June.
City of London, invited, did not send delegation to funeral of the poet of its board members claimed they did not understand from reading his works were in fact very difficult to understand that Victor Hugo motivate the refusal by such reasons. Undoubtedly, the honorable Michelin, Ruel and Lyons German from London imagined that the writer, who had just expired, was one of the proletarians of the pen, that rent by the week and year of their brains to Hachette the éditorat and Villemessant Press. But if they had learned that the deceased had his account with Rothschild, he was the strongest shareholder of the Belgian Bank, providing that man, he had placed his money out of France, where they made revolutions and when it comes to burning the ledger, and he departed for his prudence and bought the loan of five billion for the liberation of his country, because the placement was at six percent and if they had heard that the poet had accumulated five million by selling phrases and words, he was a shrewd trader of letters, a master in art of debate and draw up a contract to its advantage, he had enriched himself by ruining his publishers, who had never seen, and if we had listed the titles of the dead, of course the honorable representatives of the City of London, the commercial heart of both worlds, n ‘ would not bargain their support for the important ceremonies but would, instead, held to honor the millionaire who was able to combine poetry and should have.
The bourgeoisie of France, better informed, Victor Hugo saw one of the most perfect and most brilliant personification of his instincts, his passions and his thoughts.
The bourgeois press, intoxicated by the hyperbolic praise thrown at it full columns on the death, neglected to highlight the next representative of Victor Hugo, who may be his title as real in the eyes of posterity. I will try to repair this omission.
2
Legitimists never forgive Victor Hugo, the ultra-royalist and an ardent Catholic in 1830 before being passed to the Republican Party. They forget that a son of Vendée, de la Eochejacquelein, enlisted in the Senate of the Second Empire, cavalierly replied to such criticisms: “Only fools never change.” The poet, unable to this disdain aristocratic Never throw the party he deserted this impertinent excuse but it would explain why the Republicans had been a royalist.
- My mother was a robber of the Vendee to fifteen years she fled through the Grove, like Madame Bonchamp, as Madame de la Roche-JACQUELEIN, he wrote in 1831, in the preface to Leaves of Autumn. - My father, a soldier of the Republic and the Empire bivouacked in Europe and I lived with my mother and suffered his opinions to her “the Revolution was the guillotine, Napoleon the man who took the son, the Empire of the sword . His influence, not offset, planted in the heart of young Hugo a strong hatred of Napoleon and the Revolution, because “he had submitted everything to his mother and ready for whatever she wanted . The loyalty of Hugo was that of filial piety and one knows that better than he deserves the epitaph of a good son, good husband, good father.
Carried away by his imagination, Hugo, converted in 1830, imagined the opinions of his mother, not as they were, but as the needs of his excuses required. That robber, who fought campaign for the king fell in love with a clumsy, Republican J.-L.-S. Hugo, who, to put themselves in the fashion of the day, was saddled with the name of Brutus. She had been sitting at Nantes, where a military commission, which sometimes considered and passed by the arms in one day, batches of ten and twelve robbers and brigands. Brutus Hugo met with the committee clerk functions. In 1796, the robber married civilly Republican soldier, who more than ever Brutus, is for the time and remained until 1797, rapporteur of a war council, which considered expeditiously the royalists without further ado He condemned to death, identity and inclusion on the list of suspects identified. The robber followed her husband to Madrid, adorned the court of Joseph on the throne of Spain, replacing the legitimate king and allowed his eldest son Abel, to don the livery Bonapartist as a page. The loyalty of Mrs. Hugo, if indeed it had a political opinion, should be very platonic: otherwise he would have to admit that this woman so courageous, so faithful in his friendships (for 18 months, the risk of many dangers, she hid to Feuillantines, General Lahorie, hunted by the imperial police), and had renounced his faith and come to terms with the worst enemies of his party. Hugo had not know what excuse to turn to come to lend his dead mother, contrary opinions if flagrant acts of his life and we show the party traitor, traitor to the king that she would have faced death. He, the filial son, he has suffered from being reduced to stigmatize the mother so devoted to her children, who raised and cared so tenderly while the father abandoned them, leaving them free to grow and to obey the impulses nature. But it was absolutely necessary to find someone on whom the blame of his royalist odes, which embarrassed him more than the ball does not hinder the convict to escape across the fields he took his mother . He may plead extenuating circumstances. Were used at the time, the mother of all the ways she was already the great string dramatic was the memory of the mother to the theater paralyzed the arm of the assassin ready to strike, it was the cross mother, who exhibited at the psychological moment, warned rape, incest and saved the heroine was the death of his mother, who’s skeptical Chateaubriand and disciple of Jean-Jacques in 1797, drew the Chateaubriand mystagogical d ‘Atala and the Spirit of Christianity in 1800. Victor Hugo who never outran 24 hours of public opinion, but could always do the same, Chateaubriand mimicked his master, and applied to his private use the trick that never missed its effect on the stage.
That loyalty was Hugo circumstance or maternal origin, no matter it is certain that he was paid handsomely, and was happy, because the public bought his books in moderation: the editors Hans of Iceland him wrote in 1823 that they knew how to get rid of the 500 copies of the first edition, which remained in store. Louis XVIII granting the poet, in September 1822, a pension of 1,000 francs from his private purse, and in February 1823, a second pension of 2,000 francs on the Literary Fund of the Ministry of Interior. Victor Hugo and his two brothers, Abel and Eugene, were with the courage and tenacity of these funds based literature in 1821, they complained bitterly that the department had not supported their bimonthly magazine, The Conservative literature . They bitterly defended the merits of the reptiles while they attacked him with lust, and the indignant Conservative cons Benjamin Constant, the ex-man of letters who has denied the House a sum of 40,000 francs for to give encouragement to men of letters. The purpose of the Liberal MP, he said, to prevent the money being used to bribe some ministerial pamphleteer . Crop secret funds of the Minister was to lay hands on the property of Hugo. At the end of 1826, Victor called the Vicomte de la Rochefoucauld increased his share of these funds: since my pension has been granted, he wrote, “Four years have passed and if my pension remained what it was, I at least had the joy (which does not delighted) to see the goodness of the king increase pensions by several men of letters to my friends and some of them over the top of double. My pension is only stagnated, I think, Monsieur le Vicomte, being not without law to increase ... I put my application with confidence in your hands, begging you want to put in front of king who wants to fine arts, the brightest jewel in its crown. “ It took no account of the demand was so earnest and faithful servant of the reasons which to console himself, poured out his disappointment in a poem, where he treated Charles X of “king-joist” and his ministers of miscreants, who “France to sell the Cossacks and the soul to owls.” But to keep the existing pensions, he kept to his portfolio until 1866 they were published in Songs of streets and woods under the title: “Written in 1827.”
It is unfortunate that Victor Hugo, instead of swearing at his mother for his royalist overcome his sin of loyalty, did not simply tell the truth, that was so honorable. Indeed what is more honorable than winning money! Hugo sold to the king and his ministers, his lyrical talent as the engineer and the chemist to capitalist rent their mathematical and chemical knowledge, it detailing his merchandise stanzas intellectual and odes, like the grocer and haberdasher trot out their cotton to meter and oil bottles. If he had confessed that the rhyming ode on the birth of the Duke of Bordeaux or the ode to his baptism, or any other of his odes, he had been inspired and sustained by the hope of gain, he would at once conquered the esteem of the Bourgeoisie, who knows the give-and equal exchange and does not accept that we distribute worms, maggots or slippers gratis pro deo. Convinced that Victor Hugo was not “art for art”, but produced for sale to the bourgeoisie would have silenced the envious scribblers who, under Louis Philippe, accused the writer, his royal rewards .
If the poet had no hesitation and turns exposed the real motive of his conduct royalist, he would have gone to French poetry more real service in writing Hernani, Ruy Blas and especially the preface to Cromwell he had with the France of multiple Hugo, although only one is sufficient and beyond to the glory of a century.
Baudelaire, the evil spirit came in this age of commercialism, who learned this evil trade abhorred, lamented that when:
The poet appears in this world bored
Her mother terrified and full of blasphemy,
Clenches his fists at God who takes pity.
Why, in the middle-class families, curse and anger greet the poet’s birth? Because it has so often said that poets live in poverty and die in the hospital, as Gilbert as Malfilatre that fathers and mothers had to end up believing that poetry was synonymous with misery. But if they had proved that in this century of progress, the Romantics had domesticated the muse wanders, they had taught him the art of “playing the censer, fulfilling one of the ordinary rate, to earn bread every evening “, and if they showed the head of the romantic school receiving at twenty three thousand francs for pension to” sleeping “parent, holding that poetry brought more than the student rabbits or bookkeeping may have encouraged, rather than repress, the poetic fancies of their offspring .
The industrial and commercial bourgeoisie would not have expected his death for storing Victor Hugo, among the greatest men in history, if she had known the heroic sacrifices he imposed upon himself and the mental torture he endured to acquire these two pensions.
3
Ms. Hugo did not like Napoleon, she chose her friends for enemies after the defeat at Waterloo, to trample upon the color of the Empire, she wearing green boots, this simple fact characterizes the violent nature of his feelings . The uncle and father of Hugo ate many grievances against the Emperor, who refused to confirm it in his rank of general, given by Joseph. Lahori, who during his imprisonment from 18 months to Feuillantines, taught the young Victor to “read Tacitus”, should not, inculcate love of Bonaparte, against whom he conspired. Hugo had to marry the mother of his hatred for Napoleon, shared her husband and friends, while he put on his royalist, but he was impervious to any influence, no one could impose its sentiments, neither father nor mother, uncle, or friends: Napoleon and his extraordinary fortune filled his head, “his image constantly shook his thought.” All men of his generation underwent this disturbing action. It should read Red and Black to understand how Napoleon captured the imagination of men willing and able. All his life he obsessed Hugo as a child, he was her ideal. His classmates were playing plays his composition or those of his brother Eugene. “The usual subjects of these pieces were the wars of the empire ... it was Victor who played Napoleon. Then he covered his chest decorations radiant eagle gold and silver.” . In this time he thought little of the Vendée and his virgin martyrs, to Henry IV and the virtues of legitimate kings: Napoleon had entirely, and forgetting the play of adolescence, he studied his campaigns and followed the map the progress of his armies.
But his hero, defeated at Waterloo, is imprisoned at St. Helena that her father for refusing to go abroad Fortress Thionville is accused of treason, that Louis XVIII, makes his triumphal entry into Paris, escorted of “Cossacks huge, rolling his eyes in fierce shaggy caps, brandishing spears and red blood on the neck collars to human ears, mingled with watch chains” , and the young poet, adorn “his lapel a lily of money “, chose the subject for his first tragedy, restoration, and insults Bonaparte” the tyrant who devastated the earth. “ .
And for ten years without experiencing a moment of weariness, he “thundered in his verse the curse of the dead, like an echo of his fatal glory” . It should arrive in 1827, to see it in his Ode to the column, try to glorify the Empire indirectly praising his marshals, but to depart from the course he had imposed and had followed with such firm, Hugo had an excuse. The insult offered by the Embassy of Austria, the Marshals Soult and Oudinot highly indignant if the army and the court, that the debates and newspapers royalists took their defense in writing Ode to the column, he obeyed the word order of the royalist party. Debates inserted it to the third page.
It would be difficult. if we knew the customs of the time and the qualities of the Hugo family, understand that a young man, even a genius, could possess so perfectly, the art of containing and concealing his feelings .
Political regimes had reigned since 1789, with a dizzying speed so that the art of re denying his opinions and to greet the rising sun, was cultivated as a necessity of the struggle for existence . The Hugo family excelled in this precious art. Some biographical details on General Hugo and his eldest son, Abel, may diminish the admiration of hugolâtres for the Machiavellian genius of their hero, but will allow the psychologist to explain how such diplomacy could fit in so young brain.
Brutus Hugo, the fierce Republican in 1793, who provided Chouan royalists and the firing squad and the guillotine fructidorized the legislative body with Augereau, took service in the palace of Joseph, as a butler, changed his nickname Roman against a Spanish title of Comte, his oath to Louis XVIII, who decorates the cross of St. Louis rallied to Napoleon landed at Cannes, offers lending the oath to Louis XVIII returned to Ghent, who is retired and internal Blois there to occupy his spare time he wrote his memoirs. Abel, his eldest son, enrich a specific historical, beginning with this act of faith: “Bound by belief in constitutional monarchy, deeply imbued with the doctrine of legitimacy, by feeling committed to the August family who made us , etc. ...”.
Victor Hugo could not help but admire the examples of conduct fair that bequeathed to his children the former Brutus: he said:
Go, your son is happy in your noble heritage,
The most beautiful heritage is a venerable name!
Odes. Book II. VIII. Edit. 1823.
Abel, who died in 1873, lived until 1815 almost always with his father so he could visit his mother in charge of ultra-royalists who turned suddenly in his writings after the fall of the Empire. As Victor, he was especially committed to personal service of the royal family. While Victor sings to the coronation of the king, he published prose life anecdote of Count d’Artois, Charles X today: “No prince was more attractive than the Comte d’Artois ... it is filled grace, candor, nobility, etc. ... “ and this continues for tens of pages. The king praised he lengthens his kick “this revolution, which had plunged into all crimes and all crawled under the teacher,” he insults Bonaparte, swoons at the reading of the proclamation to the army of the Comte d ‘ Artois, Lieutenant-General of the kingdom, sent to Lyon to stop the march of Napoleon, and he commented: “As the language was noble and delicate least it was proper to make an impression on minds that seemed accessible, that that of seduction. Traitors there opposed a mocking laugh. “ His father, General Hugo was among those traitors. - Exiled Charles X, Abel decorated by Louis-Philippe for “services rendered by the pen,” wrote the popular History of Napoleon (1853), she won the warm praise of Prince Napoleon.
Abel joined to the remarkable flexibility of driving a commercial spirit, rich in resources. He published to meet the fads and the public to satisfy its tastes, studies on the Spanish theater, an edition of Romancero a brochure Guano, its value as a fertilizer, a constant guide to Paris: A Paris for 12 cents, a Remember the period of scarcity, which threatens France, an illustrated history of France, he wrote a vaudeville in collaboration with Romieu he studied Africa in the agricultural point of view, created the Journal du Soir, invented publications illustrated by delivery, etc.. Abel was a clever industrial letters.
But what we should expect is to meet the soldier in the wars of the empire, the humanitarian, on the lyre Victor had to replace the King and Catholicism. Under the pseudonym Genty, General Hugo in 1818 published a pamphlet which mingle happily concerns industrialist and philanthropist . It solves the dual problem: given a dowry for foundlings, and provide workers with white farmers, who could not, as in the past, get blacks on the African coast.
The white workers were taken to the Foundling. The government is raising the children at his own expense, may dispose at will: “he would undertake to provide the settlers, children in the age of 9 to 10 years for girls and 10 to 11 years for boys. The commitment to take all the actual date of shipment and could not exceed 15 years upon expiry of which would stop right there. The administration would then count these children as dowry, namely men 600 francs, and Women 500 francs. “ This project would satisfy everyone, and tightly bind the colonies to the metropolis. The settlers bought their pickaninnies 2 and 4 cents francs motherland provides them with small white gratis. The white children who resisted the regime lashes and forced growers would receive after 15 years, a dowry of 5 to 6 cents francs. Philanthropy bourgeois who invented the jail cell, forced labor of women and children in the workshops, waltz and simpering in the charity balls to appease the hunger of the hungry, should resume the project of General Hugo and to complement the law on repeat offenders .
4
The revolution of 1830 Victor Hugo dumbfounded, but did not prevent him from continuing, as before, to reach three thousand francs pension so honorably earned. The preface of “Autumn Leaves, published in 1831, shows hesitation, he had established relationships with young and ardent Republicans, to attract, flattered him: and the Biography of Contemporary Rabbe said that Hugo had sang the three days in the most beautiful poetry they inspired. But the doctrines Republican who could give himself the weight of inducement, entered readily into his brain: he did not need, such as Marius in Les Miserables, mount the barricades and to receive wounds to heal its neo-republicanism. Once he understands that the throne of Louis-Philippe is strengthened, he said “we need something the republic and the monarchy word” . This sentence will appear a plagiarism of the word historic ranger, is a profession of faith: it meant that he would accept the graces and favors of the monarchy, while remaining a Republican in his heart. Under Louis XVIII and Charles X, Napoleon he loved in his heart, and insulted in the verses published to please his bosses Legitimists. The Republican flattered Louis-Philippe for the peerage, as the Napoleonic Adula the Bourbons to extort pensions.
On July 21, 1842, he had the courage to throw in the face of Louis-Philippe of sentences of this caliber: “Sire, you are the noble and tireless guardian of nationality and civilization ... Your blood is the blood of country, your family and France have the same heart ... Sir, you will live much longer, for God and France need you. “ Victor Hugo has always been cosmopolitan: it united all the kings of Europe in its adulation. Later, after 1848, it will discuss the United States of Europe. But first he had “praised the accession of Queen Victoria” and celebrated the Czar Nicolas “the noble and pious emperor” . In 1846 he asked the Baron de Humboldt to deliver a speech academic “in its August King, for which, you know my sympathy and admiration.” This majesty was so admired William IV, King of Prussia, brother of the Emperor of Germany, crowned at Versailles . History does not tell if the poet received gratuities from the United Majesties of Europe.
Finally the big day arrives: Hugo recapturing the freedom of thought, will no longer be obliged to flatter the king in public and to cherish the republic in his heart. The revolution of 1848 hunting “the royal guard of civilization”, and perches in power the Republican National. One moment you think the regency possible, Victor Hugo was quick to ask the Place des Vosges, is proclaimed the Republic, Victor Hugo, without losing a minute turns into a Republican. Those who stop to appearances, accusing him of having changed, because to turn round he was a Bonapartist, legitimist Orleanist Republican, but a somewhat careful study shows instead that in all these schemes, it never altered his conduct, as always, without being distracted by the comings and reversals of government, he pursued a single subject, his interest, he always remained hugoïste, which is worse selfish, saying that merciless mocking of Heine, Victor Hugo, unable to appreciate the genius, could never feel.
Is it the fault of that poor man, so to make money, the serious purpose of the bourgeois life he had put his hat all the roundels? If there is fault, it falls on the middle class who cheered and threw all these successive governments. Hugo suffers from these policy changes: until 1830, he had to stifle his ardent admiration for Napoleon and until 1848, he had to bury his republicanism in flattery to the king, as Harmodius tyrannicide his dagger concealed beneath the flowers.
They understand evil Hugo, who see him as a man dedicated to the realization of an idea that has his life is a tissue of irreconcilable contradictions. He left that role to the ideologues, the cranks who dream life he was content to be a reasonable man, not caring, or the likeness of his five-franc pieces, or form of government maintains the ‘order in the street is good for trade, and provides pensions and places. In his autobiography he states explicitly that “the form of government seemed secondary issue.” In the preface to the inner voice of 1837, he took as his motto: “Be all parties for their generous side, (that is to say that report) be any of their bad sides (c that is to say that cause loss).
Hugo was a friend of order: he never conspired against any government, that of Napoleon III, except it has accepted and supported all of his pen and his word and has not abandoned the day after their fall. His conduct is that of any trader, knowing his job a house can prosper only if his master sacrifices his political preferences and accept the fait accompli. The Dollfus, the Koechlin, the Scheurer-Kestner, the Republicans models of Mulhouse, the free city until 1793, did they not accommodated at all speeds, which for nearly a century, have succeeded in Alsace; have not received grants from the Empire and did not they called for customs exemptions for their industry and repressive measures against their workers? Business first, then politics.
From 1848 to 1885, Hugo behaves as “honest and moderate Republican” and one can challenge his opponents to discover during these long years, one day fail.
In 1848, conservatives and reactionaries most pronounced compromise for the republic that had just been proclaimed: Victor Hugo did not hesitate a moment to follow their noble example. “I’m ready,” he said in his manifesto to the voters, to devote my life to establish the Republic, which multiply the railways ... tenfold the value of land ... dissolve the riot will ... order, the law of citizens of France ... grow, conquer the world, is in short the majestic embrace of humankind in God’s eyes met. “ This republic is good, true, the Republic of cases, this “generous sides” of its currency in 1837.
- I am ready went there to devote my life to “prevent the establishment of the republic who will shoot the tricolor flag in red, make big money with the column, to lay down the statue of Napoleon and compile the statue of Marat, destroy Institute, Ecole Polytechnique and the Legion of Honor; add to the famous motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, option sinister or death will become bankrupt, ruin the rich without enrich the poor, destroy the credit is the fortune and all the work that is the bread of each property and abolish the family, walk heads on pikes, fill prisons with suspicion and empty out the massacre, will put Europe in flames and civilization to ashes, will make France the home of darkness, kill freedom, stifle the arts, decapitated thought, deny God. “ This republic is the social republic.
Victor Hugo has faithfully kept his word. It was from those who shut their national workshops, which threw the workmen in the street, to drown in blood the social ideas that were strafing and deporting the insurgents of June, the prosecution who voted against the deputies suspected of socialism, which supported the Prince Napoleon, who wanted a strong government to restrain the masses, terrorize socialists, reassure the citizens and protect the family, religion, property threatened by the Communists, the barbarians of civilization. With heroic courage, no pity for the vanquished, no sense of justice of their cause n’ébranlèrent, Victor Hugo, worthy son of Brutus Hugo in 1793, voted with the majority, mistress of force. His votes glorious and eloquent words are well known and are collected in the annals of the reaction that gave birth to the empire, but it ignores the conduct, not less admirable in his journal, founded the event July 30, 1848, with the contest Vacquerie, Theophile Gautier, and her son, she deserves to be reported.
The event took the motto, which, after June was the season: “Hate to anarchy - tender and profound love of the people.” And we do not mistake the meaning of the second sentence, the specimen number said that the event “just talk to the poor of the rights of the rich in each of its duties.” The issue the first of November announced “it is good that the National Who is the aristocracy of the Republic is given for 15 cents, the event that wants to talk to the poor will sell for a penny.” The poet began to understand that in small grants for the poor, were better pensions in secret funds and government coffers of the rich.
Following the example set by Thiers in the Rue de Poitiers, as Victor Hugo someone always imitated, Event indoctrinated people, spread in the masses of workers healthy and comforting theories of political economy, rejects Proudhon fighting “the flattering language of the people who slander. The people listen to those who maintain the principles and obligations more willingly than those who talk about their interests and rights.” (Number 1 November). He is the apostle of liberalism, bourgeois religion that entertains the people with principles, it teaches the duty, and turn from their interests and rights, which makes him abandon the substance for the shadow.
After the insurrection of June, there remained, according to Hugo, a way to save the republic - to deliver his enemies. Thiers thought so after the Commune. Reform incapable of rising to the intelligence of this Machiavellian tactics, complaining that “the Republicans are blacklisted. They fled, they were denied, while there is no Legitimists or Orleans, disparaged, whose ignorance is not back and we try to rehabilitate at any price. “ The bank’s Event nail him with this striking reply: “If the Republicans are so suspicious, is not the fault of Republicans? ... Christianity has been really powerful only when the priests were lost direction. “ (Number 1 August). And to protect the Republic against the Republican newspaper of Victor Hugo takes the field against Caussidiere because he is not “the head, but the hand”; cons Louis Blanc, because “his crime, what are his ideas; his books, his speeches, his accomplices, are his three hundred thousand people! “ (Number 27 August); Proudhon cons because it is “a small man with a common, miserable people’s advocate”; cons Ledru-Rollin because “its circular civilization plunged into a civil war four days. From February 24 until June 24 Ledru-Rollin was one of those who have contributed most to pave the road to the abyss. “ (Number August 6).
But in pursuing his injuries, his anger and his denunciations of the defeated in June, the event gives the measure of his deep love for the Republic. Listen, is the author speaks of punishment: “Yesterday, at the end of the most painful corruption, which broke, it was greed, those who were poor had only one idea, stripping rich. We did not ask more of life, we asked the stock exchange. The property was treated flight State was ordered to feed at great expense idleness, the first task of government was to distribute, not the king’s power, but Millions of the civil list, and talk to people not of intelligence and thought but food and belly ... Yes, we have arrived at this point that all decent people, and the broken heart pale forehead, are forced to admit the war councils at all times, transportations distant clubs closed newspapers suspended, and the indictment of representatives of the people. “ (Number 28 August).
The hard necessity which distressed the heart of honest people and hardened to the ruthless repression, Hugo forced to lie shamelessly.
On August 28, 1848, Victor Hugo, to arouse the martial to condemn mercilessly beaten denounces as “poor, who had only one idea: rob the rich.” Two months ago, looters in June had invaded her house. They knew it was “one of the sixty representatives sent by the Constituent to quell the insurgency and lead columns of attack.” They searched the apartment to search for weapons, they saw hanging on the wall “a Turkish yatagan, the handle and scabbard are solid silver ... arranged on a table, jewelry, stamps precious gold and silver .. . when they were gone, we found that these hands ... black powder had touched anything. Not a valuable object was missing. “ These are the words of Victor Hugo, telling the bag from his home by looters of June But to describe the scene, he waited until the councils of war had finished their work of repression, he was then exiled. - Victor Hugo remains the same, among the most diverse circumstances: during the restoration legitimist insults Napoleon, who enthusiastically during the bourgeois reaction, it slander the insurgents, whom he admires the delicate act of honesty.
A strange fate hung over Victor Hugo and his whole life, he was sentenced to say and write the opposite of what he thought and felt.
In exile, to please those around him, he harangued on the freedom of press, speech and other freedoms yet, but he did not hate nothing more than this freedom, which enables “demagogues madmen, sow in the soul of the people of mad dreams, theories treacherous ... and ideas of rebellion. “ (Event of 3 November). The rebellion crushed, the House passed the security commander “silence the poor!” in the words of Lamennais. The event hastened and the Debates on Constitutional and approve the Century “measure so favorable to the serious press. ... We consider it necessary ... the Company had a gangrenous freedom; bail the surgeon has to operate feared the social body. “ (Number 11 August). The libertarian Hugo was not the man to hesitate before amputation of freedom that worries the ruling class and the confusion over the award.
Victor Hugo then committed the great blunder of his political life: he took the Prince Napoleon for a fool, which he hoped to make a step. Indeed it was the general opinion of politicians on the one that Rochefort was nicknamed the Parrot melancholy because even in error, Hugo was not original, mistaking it imitated someone. He was so absorbed by the desire to cram in a Bonapartist ministry, he did not notice that the Morny, the Persigny and other Cassagnac band had captured the fool and they heard it book operation. These gentlemen, with a shamelessness that surprised and shocked him greatly, sent the gossip in the small branch of the Rue de Poitiers and escamotèrent his nose and his beard department so ardently coveted. Instead of epayment his disappointment and his indignation was as usual, he forgot himself and flung himself impetuously into the opposition. The Republicans of the House, missing men, welcomed him despite his past and compromising the anointed leader. Intoxicated he dreamed the presidency.
The coup that surprised to read the Republican leaders, disturbed his plans, he was forced into exile following his supporters, since they had promoted to chief. The scoundrels who, unexpectedly, had seized the government, were so deficient, their power seemed so precarious, that the citizens of France swept Republicans do not believe the length of the Empire. During the weeks and months, every morning, trembling with emotion, they unfolded their newspapers to read the government fell in December and triumphant reminder, they held their trunks packed for the trip. These bourgeois republicans who were massacred and deported en masse workers naive enough to claim the term social reforms that were to pay three months of misery in the service of the Republic, did not include the two in December was logical consequence of days in June They did not notice that even when they had not believed that strafe Communist and workers, they had killed the most vigorous defenders of their Republic. Victor Hugo, who was unable to untangle a political situation, shared their blindness, he cursed in prose and verse the people because he did not overturn the instant the Empire that he and his friends had established and consolidated in the People’s blood.
Thrown from his ambitious dreams and fevered by the constant expectation of the immediate fall of Napoleon III, Hugo for the first and only time in his life gives free rein to turbulent passions that troubled him her heart. Disappointed in his personal ambitions, the furious attacks on individuals, Rouher to Maupas, to Troplong, who overthrew his plans: he takes them head on, the covers of spitting, biting, strikes, the terrace tramples with epileptic fury. The poet is sincere in punishment: it is the whole with his wounded vanity, his ambition betrayed, anger and envy jealous rage. His verses that idle amplifications and stunning make comparisons usually so cold, come alive and vibrate with passion. It emerges under loads of rubbish romantic verses like sharp knives and hot irons as red worms that repeat history. The punishment, the most popular work of Victor Hugo, taught the youth of the empire of hatred and contempt for men of the Empire.
There are hugolâtres good company, monarchists, even Republicans, who took fright shouting matches with cats: they never talk about it or sometimes if they mention it with oratorical and reluctance endless. Their prudery prevents them from recognizing the services that this pamphlet went mad and makes even the conservatives from all sources. Hugo dying of insults Canrobert and Saint-Arnaud of the Bonapartist party in December, but he shoots not only to the Cavaignac, the Brea and Clement Thomas Band bourgeois June Kill socialists in overalls, seemed the order of things, but loaded on the Boulevard Montmartre, take by storm the house-Drouzas Sallan, snipe some citizens in tails and top hat hat! Oh! the most heinous crimes! The punishment does not know in June and December complain that: concentrating on December hatreds, they cast oblivion on June
In his preface of 18 Brumaire, Karl Marx said about Napoleon the Little: “Victor Hugo is confined to spiritual and bitter invective against the chief editor of the coup. In his book seems to be the event that a thunderbolt in a serene sky, the violent act of one individual. He did not notice that the individual grows, instead of shrinking, giving it a force of its own initiative, such it would be unprecedented in world history. “ But by magnifying unconsciously, the Little Napoleon in Napoleon the Great, by piling on his head the crimes of the bourgeois class, Hugo exonerate the bourgeois republicans who prepared the empire and innocent social institutions that create antagonism classes, fomenting civil war, require the coup against the socialist and allow the coups against the bourgeois parliament. By accumulating anger on people, on Napoleon and his acolytes, it distracts people from looking for causes of social misery, which are the monopoly of social wealth by the capitalist class it away people’s share of its revolutionary goal, which is the expropriation of the capitalist class and the socialization of the means of production. - Few books have been more useful to the wealthy that Napoleon le Petit and cats.
Other hugolâtres, panegyrists awkward, taking seriously the statements of dedication and selflessness of the poet, represent him as a hero of self-denial - they stripped him of his bourgeois prestige, for simplicity. At the hearing, he was one of these dangerous maniacs, infatuated with social and political ideas to the point of sacrificing their material interests, they would assimilate these Blanqui, these Garibaldi, these Varlin, these fools who had a purpose in life, achieving their ideal. - No, Victor Hugo was never stupid enough to serve the Republican propaganda, even a few thousand francs from his millions - if he had sacrificed anything for his ideas, a procession of citizens, as many, would not have accompanied the Pantheon M. Jules Ferry wish him his birthday, two years before his death, would not have welcomed the name of Master. If Victor Hugo had this policy of reckless, he would be out of the bourgeois tradition. For the characteristic of the political evolution in civilized countries, is to rid the political dangers it presented and the sacrifices that used to require.
In France, England, the United States ministers in power and elected to the House and the Municipal Councils, only ruin themselves more, but enriched: in these countries is no longer condemns ministers for fiddling boursicotiers, embezzlement and abuse of power. Parliamentary responsibility covers their mistakes and protects against any suit, France’s republican gave a memorable example of this policy reasonable and pleasant day it raised to the rank of senators MM. Broglie and Buffet for the console to have failed in their attempt monarchist coup. Parliamentary politics is a lucrative career: it offers no pecuniary risks of trade and industry, a small capital of establishment, a good supply of gab, a bit of luck and good interpersonal skills will ensure success . Hugo knew that this positive policy. Once he became convinced that the existence of the empire was assured for a long time, he put out his wrath justiciardes and concentrated all his activity to his trade of adjectives and phrases rhyme and rhythm.
He was in his blind rage launched such categorical statements, and unfortunately for him they had a huge impact if he had scored the men’s coup to such poignant, it was impossible to make them forget it had to remain Republican and abandoning the policy it thought it better to bravely accept the role of martyr for the Republic, a victim of Duty. The role appealed to his vanity. If he was not born in an island, like Napoleon, he was exiled to live on an island as well as himself. Imitating Napoleon, become the Napoleon of letters, rocked the ambition of his life.
The proscribed elbow all the misery, “said the great Florentine, but Hugo had more intelligence than Dante. With an art that Barnum never equaled, it was the exile of the most sensational advertisements. The exile was loud and blinding sign hanging in his shop bookstore Upper Town House. The kings had not retired as a sum of 3,000 francs, its bourgeois clientele it was worth fifty thousand francs a year. There was not lost on exchange. He found that the Empire was good: “Napoleon has made my fortune,” he confessed in one of those rare moments when he deposited his crown of thorns. How bourgeois bourgeoisie ecstatic she not before the man, who had managed to restore the exiled so sweet and so profitable? - The geniuses we know renames find that pain in exile, traders who move abroad in Senegal, India, the countries of fever and hepatitis, after ten and twenty years of exile fail to gather a ball of several hundred thousand francs, if they have the wind in its sails in luck, and Victor Hugo himself, the Modern Prometheus, lives in a delicious island, where doctors send their handicapped, he ‘s surrounded by a court of eager flatterers, who are frothing, he travels quietly in Europe, he hoarded millions and he gets the crown of martyrdom! ...
Friends and foes of Victor Hugo, were accredited rash judgments brought upon him by fear and admiration in the interests of its glory it is necessary to revise them.
Phraseology soaring Hugo thirty-five years gives goosebumps to shakers qu’épouvantent the words to Prudhomme, who all clown, juggling with the words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Humanity, Cosmopolitanism, United States of Europe, revolution and other swings of liberalism, is a revolutionary, a socialist right to safe, if not shot. But Hugo, and this is its most serious claim to fame was able to so blatantly contradict his actions and his words, he has not yet found in Europe and America a politician to demonstrate a more striking the perfect safety of truculent expressions of liberalism.
As we eat bread and meat, Hugo feeds of humanity and fraternity. - On August 14, 1848, eight days after the start of the first convoy, carrying 581 insurgents, he founded next to the Meeting of the Rue de Poitiers Meeting of the Society. The fear of losing their dear money, the Pereire and Mires of imperial finance, were confiscated so blithely, had enraged the middle class of 1848. The press should be moderate and the insurgents told some horrible stories: - looted houses, mobile sawn between two planks, one filled skulls of wine and emptied it singing obscenities ... Hugo knew that if the rebels invaded the houses, they do not plunder he had seen them fight like heroes. The simple humanity required him to protest against these idiotic slander and try to appease those citizens fearful, demanding a ruthless crackdown. But the Brotherhood hugoïste composition was not so human, it did not intend to suspend the activities of councils of war, “but tempered the eye of the judge by the tears of a brother ... and try to carry through into punishing the fraternity of the assembly. “ (Event, No. 14). - And in almost all issues, the event continues to stir anger and fear against the defeated .
Liberty was one of Pegasus, qu’enfourchait Hugo. But it must be three times Prudhomme for not noticing that the Pegasus was overinflated hugoïste wind to take the bit between their teeth and throwing fireworks. The fiery freedom of Hugo was a humble pony, he returned to the stable of all governments. Since the immortal revolution of 1789, Freedom, Freedom darling, is the refrain in fashion. All politicians since Polignac to Napoleon the Little have repeated in every key. Hugo singing loudly when he approved the bond which amputated body social “free mortified” by the press.
Hugo planted in his verses the red cockade of equality. But there is equality and equality as poets and poets: there are as many as moral. Any class, any social body manufactures for use by its members a moral force. The moral of the merchant, authorizing him to sell his wares ten and twenty times over its value, if possible, that the judge encouraged him to use trickery and deception to compel the defendant to accuse; that of the customs officer requires him to violate it medically women suspected of working with their sex of the annuitant exemption to obey the biblical commandment - “Thou shalt earn thy bread by the sweat of your brow ... “ Death lays his way to a tie, the big and small pox create others, social inequalities have given birth to two beautiful coming of equalities: the equality of heaven, which compensates for Christians inequalities in society and civil equality, the very sublime conquest of the Revolution serves the same purpose. The civil equality, which retains the Rothschild their millions and their parks, and their poor rags and fleas, is the only equality that Hugo knows. He was too fond of his income and the antitheses to desire equality property of the blow he had taken his millions and stole the easiest and most brilliant contrasts of his poetics.
Instead, the Event of September 9, 1848 assumed the defense of “luxury slandered the false philanthropy of our days” and triumphantly demonstrated the need for poverty to achieve social balance. - “The lazy wealth is the best friend of the laborious poverty, the paper develops hugoïste. Who is this that provides the wealth that ruinous superfluous; this research, this bauble which is comprised of fashion and pleasure? Work , industry, art, that is to say, poverty. Luxury is the most certain alms alms is involuntary. The vagaries of the rich are the best income of the poor. Most of the show will pleasure, the workshop will be more welfare. Mysterious scales that measure the heaviest part of the necessities of society lighter frivolities of another! strange balance established between the fantasies of the top, and needs from below! The more flowers and lace in the plateau that rises, the more bread in the tray down! “ - The most useless waste and ridicule becomes more mysterious ways of divine providence to create social harmony based on the misery needy and the idle rich. Luxury has never been more beautifully glorified. When the Event, the body of the Fraternity hugoïste, published his apology for luxury, just two months had elapsed since the insurrection of June, “protest the misery” and the blood of civil war still blushed the cobbled streets.
The words Hugo enriches his vocabulary after 1848, brought him wrong in the minds of Prudhommes they bewildering to the point where they would take bladders for lanterns and writer for a socialist for sharing. Victor Hugo share! - Rather than sharing anything with anyone, he would have sacrificed his hand all the executors and all his first friend, her beloved Vacquerie, who could not kill himself on his bier and the servants on the burning of ancient heroes would be buried in the tomb effigy in the master. The poet was worthy of such sacrifice Hugo was indeed a hero of the sentence.
The revolution of 1848 launched in honest language and moderate people of new words from the literary reaction started in the consulate, they slept in speeches, pamphlets, newspapers and proclamations of the great revolutionary period and did not venture daylight timidly, in the vernacular. The bullies of romanticism, Janin, the Gauthier, fell back appalled, but Hugo does not have blinked an eye, he grabbed the nouns and adjectives horrifying, invading the language written in newspapers and spoken at the forum of popular assemblies; magician and wonderful he juggled to stun onlookers with the immortal principles of 1789 and the words still stained with the blood of nobles and priests. He then opened the romance a career that was to go alone; literary companions of 1832, more timid than the citizens they were mocked and dared not follow that they called their master.
Victor Hugo himself, seems to have been intimidated by the revolutionary expressions which he handled and he does not understand the exact meaning. He wanted to ensure he had committed by mistake, even in thought, sin socialist he examined his conscience in his autobiography and he became convinced that he who had written about the poor people, poverty, and other subjects compositions rhetoricians tirades pave the Palais Bourbon, he had requested a single social reform, the abolition of the death penalty “the first of all - be small . And yet he could say he had only followed the example of all the apostles of humanitarianism, from Guizot to Louis-Philippe, and that at first he had considered the penalty Death at a literary point of view and fanciful, like an excellent theme verbose declamation, to add to “cross my mother -” Voice of Blood “and other stuff of romance that began to wear out and lose their action on the big public.
A socialism that is limited to practical social reform: the abolition of the death penalty, is liable to disturb the executioners, he threatens vested interests. And it should not be surprised if at the publication of the “bible socialist Hugo, Les Miserables, it is found that Lamartine or older to be shocked that, thirty years after Eugene Sue,” the only man who by Thomas De Banville had something to say, “dare to pity a man sent to the galleys for stealing a loaf and a poor girl prostituting herself to feed the bourgeois bastard who abandoned pregnant. It was indeed quaint and childish. But where Victor Hugo spreads roughly bourgeois spirit is personified when these two institutions of any bourgeois society, the police operation within two ridiculous Javert, made under the informer and Jean Valjean, the convict which rehabilitates in a few years amassing a fortune on the backs of its workers. Fortune wash all the stains and is in lieu of all virtues, Hugo, and any citizen, can understand the existence of a society without police and without exploitation of workers.
The worship of God Property is the religion of Victor Hugo. In his view, the confiscation of the Orleans family is one of the most hideous crimes of Napoleon III. And if it had been a member of the Assembly of Versailles, he would, on the proposal of Mr. Thiers, passed the 50 million award to the Orleans, respect for property. His hatred of the Socialists, he denounced so fiercely in 1848, is so intense that its classification of beings, which disturb society, it places the last step Lacenaire, the murderer, and immediately above, Babeuf, the Communist .
People who would be the most appalling bad faith, they were ignorant or forgetful, have supposed that the man who in November 1848, wrote that “the insurrection of June is criminal and will be sentenced by the history, as it was by the company ... if it had succeeded, it would not work on, but the looting, “(Event, No. 94) that the man had deserted the cause of sacred property and defended the uprising of March 18. And this because he had opened his house in Brussels to refugees from the Commune. But in his letter noisy while in Hugo is claimed, and later as a terrible year, did not he protested indignantly against acts of war of the Commune did not he insulted the Communards so violently that ‘formerly Bonapartists, stigmatizing them with the epithets of killers of children fifteen years, robbers, assassins, incendiaries? But the radicals and so hugolâtre Camille Pelletan had to find that the Victor Hugo compromised by incontinence of insults and slander against the losers of the Bloody Week.
What was so extraordinary in the act of Victor Hugo, and to disturb the Pessard Press Versailles. Is it that despite the pressing demands of MM. Thiers and Favre, the ministers of Queen Victoria and King Amadeo did not open their countries, England and Spain, these losers, they have never insulted and Victor Hugo. Nobody will accuse the men of State pact with the Socialists and the enemies of the property. In Switzerland, Belgium, England, everywhere, the citizens, everything is more bourgeois, did not they open their purses to help the exiles without bread or work that has Victor Hugo never, former exile millionaire?
That Legitimists, who had nurtured, pampered, advocated decorated Victor Hugo, piously preserve a bitter grudge against the young Eliacim, that coward when the Revolution of 1830 their hard hands the key of the cassette to pensions, nothing more natural. They accused him of desertion, betrayal, nothing more just. However, the peer of France of the Orleans monarchy, which was brought to his mother the weight of his loyalty, might have explained his Orleanism by his love of the corporation and say: “I, the man always faithful to duty j ‘ I had to obey the commandments of morality higher than the gratitude I obeyed the orders of practical morality: no money, no Swiss, nor a poet. “ But the former bosses of the writer beyond all measure, when to damage the disposal of his goods among the pious, they slander him and call him an infidel. Nothing more false.
Victor Hugo had the misfortune to be born of wicked parents, and to be high among the ungodly. Her mother did not allow him to eat God , but gave him, however, for teachers, priests skeptics, who during the Revolution had thrown to the winds the cassock and breviary. And yet an ardent faith suddenly awakens in his soul, the same day that the throne and the altar, one supporting the other, are placed back on their feet. He then strangled her and sings Voltairianism the Catholic religion, its pomp and pensions . Legitimists they do not recognize is the sure sign dune faith sincere opportunist? They show demanding to the extreme, when they ask that Catholicism hand survive the causes that had led. They had to remain the masters of power to preserve that Hugo until his eighty-third year, faith in God, the priests, but he had to go to identify and suspend its worship for this God who continually reveal his real presence in the distribution of pensions. Thus a banker cuts the client’s credit ruined, spinning on Belgium.
The Revolution of 1830 gave way to Voltaire and free thought; Victor Hugo, the sunflower, as its nature condemned to turn with the sun, placed as a cook’s apron, her lawful and circumstance of his Catholicism. There were new teachers to meet. He worshiped the God of the good people of Beranger and burned Jehovah, the God grim and dark, but that was better suited to her romantic brain. This change of Gods proves the sincerity of his deism. He must at all costs God he needed for his personal use to be a prophet to be a tripod .
He rose easily to the level of gross irreligion of his readers because it not asked to sacrifice the effects of banal romantic poetry that drew from the idea of God and Christian Charity, on which the Freethinkers are discharged from care to relieve the misery created by their operation, he could even continue to praise the priest and the nun, the moral police that the middle class employee to complete the work of law enforcement constable and a soldier .
Victor Hugo died without priests, or prayers or communion without confession, Catholics are appalled, but people to God, can not blame him for never had a wicked thought. Its gigantic brain remained hermetically sealed to the criticism leveled encyclopaedists and philosophical theories of modern science. In 1831, a scientific debate passionately intellectual Europe: Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were discussing the origin and formation of beings and worlds. The old Goethe, that Hugo disdainfully calls “the poet of the indifference”, the soul filled with a sublime enthusiasm, listening to reason these two powerful geniuses. - Hugo, indifferent to philosophy and science, devote his “great genius” who “embraced in its immensity visible and invisible, the ideal and the real monsters of the sea and the creatures of the earth. .. “ to tilt the “balance hemistich” and rhyming navel and April, Jewish and tallow, dyke and gibberish, Marengo and lumbago.
Thirty years later, Charles Darwin took up the theory of G. Saint-Hilaire and Lamarck, his master, he fertilized his vast knowledge and his brilliant discoveries, and triumphant, he implanted in natural science and renewed conception of human creation. Hugo, “the thinker of the nineteenth century º, that hugolâtres called” the century of Hugo “; Hugo, who was in his head” idea man “lived indifferent to the middle of this wonderful movement of ideas. It poeta Sovrano, who spent most of his life to run in the catalogs and dictionaries history and geography, after the rich rhymes, does not deign to notice that Lamarckism, Darwinism, Transformism, rhymed more richly although hunger and génovéfain.
We will remember the orgy of hyperbole in the Paris press, which lasted ten long days. Already we are beginning to return to the exuberance of forced admiration, and we soon come to regard these days of excitement and climax, as a moment of inexplicable madness.
It would be idle to discuss whether in the near future the works of Victor Hugo live in the memory of men such as Molière and Lafontaine in France, of Heine and Goethe in Germany in Shakespeare’s England; Cervantes in Spain, or whether they will sleep a deep sleep next to the poems of the Cavalier Marino, laminated with fatigue, only a few scholars studying the origins of classical literature. But scholars of the seventeenth century º announced that Adone erase forever the Furioso, the Divine Comedy and the Iliad, and delirious crowds walking banners, which was proclaimed as illustrated Marin was “the soul poetry, the spirit of lyres, the rule of poets ... the miracle of genius ... the man whose glorious pen gives the poem its true value, the speech its natural colors, the verse its true harmony in the Fireworks his perfect prose ... admired doctors, kings honored, subject acclamations of the world, celebrated by the desire itself, etc.. etc... “ Shakespeare died forgotten his age.
Sometimes the future generations do not ratify the judgments of contemporaries. But historical criticism that admires nor blame, but tries to explain everything, adopt the popular axiom, there is no smoke without fire, she thinks that the writer hailed by his contemporaries, has won their applause because he was able to flatter their tastes and their passions and express their thoughts and feelings in the language they could understand. Every writer that spends the public’s infatuation, whatever its literary merits and demerits, becomes by that fact alone a high historical value and becomes what Emerson called a representative type of a class, then dune. - This is how Hugo came looking to win the admiration of the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, sovereign mistress of social power, would have a literature that reproduced his ideas and feelings and speak the language she loved classical literature developed to please the aristocracy, could not suit him. When you consider the romantic critically, studies so far has been only rhetorical exercises, where we took care to praise or denigrate, rather than analyze, compare and d explain, we’ll see exactly how the Romantic writers met, in form and substance, the requirements of the bourgeoisie, although many of them did not suspect the role they filled with such consciousness.
Hugo, is distinguished not by ideas, nor feelings, but the shape he was conscious. The form is for him the important thing, “Take,” he said to all these great men and this simple little thing, style, and Voltaire, Pascal, Boileau, Bossuet, Fenelon, Racine, Corneille , Lafontaine, Molière, these masters, you will he? - What remains of Homer after passing through Bitaubé. - The truth of the observation and the strength and originality of thought, things are secondary, which does not count. - “The form is something more absolute than you think ... All art that wants to live well must begin to ask itself questions of form of language and style ... Style is the key to the future ... Without style you can have success at the time, the applause, noise, band, crown, drunk with the acclamation of the multitude, you will not have the true triumph of true glory, true conquest, laurel true, as Cicero said: insignia victoriae not victoriam “.
Victor Cousin, the romantic philosophy, and Victor Hugo, the philosopher of Romanticism, the bourgeoisie served the kind of philosophy and literature she asked. The Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, the D’Alembert and Condillac º eighteenth century had too much to think that it should desire to relax and enjoy without breaking a sweet head of philosophy and sentimental poetry, which were put more intelligence into play, but amuse the reader, the transport in the clouds and the land of dreams, and his eyes charmed by the beauty and boldness of the images, and his ears by the pump and harmony periods.
The revolution of 1789 transplanted the center of social life from Versailles to Paris, and the court rooms, streets, cafes and popular assemblies. The newspapers, pamphlets, speeches were the literature of the time, everyone spoke and wrote without any discomfort and trampled on the rules of taste and grammar. A nation of words, neologisms, expressions, phrases and images, drawn from all provinces and all social strata, invaded the polite language, developed by two centuries of aristocratic culture. The day after the death of Robespierre, grammarians and purists took the rod torn out of their hands and began to work to expel the intruder and repair the breaches of the language of the XVIII ° century, started by the sans-culottes. They succeeded in part and imitating precious Hotel Rambouillet, they châtrèrent language spoken and written thousands of words, phrases that he had not yet been returned. Fortunately Chateaubriand, following the example set by the royalists in the Acts of the Apostles who had supported the throne and the altar in the language of markets, defended, to the horror of purists, the reaction and religion with the language and rhetoric engendered by the revolution. The success of Atala, Engineering of Christianity and the Martyrs was immense. The honor of being in this century, not made, but on literary language is romantic Chateaubriand, who was the master of Victor Hugo.
But Chateaubriand, with the exception of a small fort known song and a play precisely known, write in prose. He still had to break the mold of classic verse, to soften to a new harmony to enhance images, phrases and words that had already commonplace and prose to resurrect the old forms of French poetry . Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, Vigny, Gautier, Banville, Baudelaire and others undertook this task. Hugo, in the eyes of the large public monopolized the glory of the galaxy romantic, not because he was the greatest poet, but because his poetry embraces all genres and subjects, the ode to the satire, the love song to the political pamphlet: and because he was the only one to put into tirades quack philanthropy and bourgeois liberalism. Everywhere he appeared virtuoso skill. As the milliners and dressmakers mannequins adorn the shelves of their brightest clothes to catch the eye of the passer, as Victor Hugo costume ideas and feelings that furnished the bourgeois phraseology bewildering calculated to strike the ear and cause consternation, a bombastic verbiage, harmony and rhythmic rhyming, studded with dazzling and striking antitheses, epithets lightning. It was, after Chateaubriand, the biggest displays of words and images of the century.
His literary talents merchandiser had not sufficed to assure him the admiration of confidence, so universal, and his acts, even more than his writings earned him the esteem of the bourgeoisie. Hugo was bourgeois into any of his actions.
He crossed himself devoutly before the sacramental formula of Romanticism: Art for art, but all citizens and thinking only of making his fortune, he devoted his talent to please the tastes of the public who pays, and under the circumstances He sang the monarchy or republic, proclaimed freedom or approved the gagging of the press and when it was necessary to arouse public attention he fired shots from pistols - the beautiful, the ugly is the most its noisy firecrackers.
He boasted of being the unchanging man, attached to duty as the mollusk to rock, but as any citizen wishing to make any money his way, he adapted himself to all circumstances and greeted eagerly powers and opinions rising in the distance. Embedded lightly in a political, poorly combined, he turned quickly, leaving his buddies conspire and spend their time and money to the Republican propaganda, and start to use his fame and while he intimated that he cherished the traditional black bread of exile, it sold its weight in gold his prose and poetry.
He said simple heart, speaking as he was thinking and acting as he spoke, but, as any trader seeking to busy his shop, he threw the dressing in handfuls, and rose steadily beaten in public. The staging of his death is the culmination of his career as an actor, so rich in effect cleverly engineered. Everything is considered, planned, since the float of the poor in order to exaggerate its size by the simplicity and win the sympathy of the crowd always gobeuse, to gossip about the million he bequeathed to a hospital on 50 thousand for this, and 20 miles to do this in order to push the government to the generosity and obtain triumphal funeral without paying a penny.
The citizens appreciated the high qualities of Hugo, so rare to find together in a man of letters: the skill in the conduct of life and economy in the wealth management . They recognized in Hugo, crowned with the halo of martyrdom and flaming rays of glory, a man of their case and the more exalted devotion to duty, his love of the idea and the depth of his thought, and they were proud to see that he was petrified of the same qualities themselves. They gazed and admired in Hugo, as well as in a mirror. The bourgeoisie gave significant evidence of its identification with the “great man” it buried in the Pantheon. While she invited him to his funeral the first of June all nations, it does not close the Exchange and did not suspend the commercial and financial life because the first day of June was maturity of commercial bills and vouchers of public values . Her heart told her that Victor Hugo, poeta Sovrano have disapproved this measure, he who, for anything, would delayed twenty four hours of receipt of his income and his debts.